Rick Astley reveals brother's devastating death at 3, abusive father, 'detached' mother and homelessness struggle

He’s known for his good-humoured, down-to-earth and affable personality – and now he’s telling his own honest story as he opens up about the highs and lows of being an 80s music legend

Rick Astley admits that his famous 1987 hit made him feel like he’d hit the jackpot. “Becoming that guy who sang Never Gonna Give You Up was like winning the lottery,” he says of the song that gave him all the money he ever needed. “Maybe for about 15 seconds I might have been almost as famous as David Bowie.”

The singer-songwriter remains endearingly modest today. He found superstardom at the age of 21 with that iconic single, which topped the charts in 25 countries and sold more than a million copies in the UK alone, but he didn’t let fame go to his head. “I’ve never been the kind of guy who’s got two Ferraris on the drive and I’m about to drive one into a swimming pool. I’m not that motivated by stuff. My main motivation about having money is being comfortable and being quite protected, which comes from my strange, erratic upbringing,” he says.

Rick, 58, writes about his childhood and pop career in his autobiography, Never. One of five children – one of his brothers died from meningitis as a young child – he was brought up in the little town of Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside by a volatile father, whose violent outbursts left the children in fear, and a mother who was emotionally detached from her offspring.

Dad Ozzy, a handyman, threw wife Cynthia out when Rick was about four, accusing her of having an affair, and later moved the children into a mobile unit in a field, where they lived amid a mishmash of machinery, vehicles, storage wagons, chickens and goats. His rages continued until an incident in which Ozzy pushed Rick, then 17, to the ground, threatening to kick him, until his brother Mike took a knife to his father’s throat and said he’d kill him if he carried on.

Today, Rick is keen to put it all into perspective. “There was a lot of love there from my dad and from my mum – they just weren’t amazing at always making me feel that. They were broken themselves.”

In his teens Rick joined FBI, a band performing in pubs in the north-west, who started to make a name for themselves. By lucky coincidence, a local hairdresser was dating music producer Pete Waterman, who saw Rick sing and plucked him out of obscurity.

Aside from loving music, Rick’s prime motivation was to have stability in his life. “I didn’t do this in a mercenary way to make some money, bank it and buy a nice house – that’s just a by-product. But I definitely was motivated to do something to obtain my own independence because I didn’t want to be at the behest of my dad and the way he saw things and did things.”

Rick has been with his Danish wife Lene Bausager for more than 35 years. They met when she worked for his record label in Denmark and she now manages him. They live in Richmond, south-west London, and have a grown-up daughter, Emilie.

People recognise Rick when he’s out and about, but it doesn’t irritate him and he’s tolerant even if he’s out with friends and family, agreeing to selfies with strangers.

“If someone comes up and says ‘I like what you do’, that’s hard to ignore. If someone shouts ‘w*****’ at me in the street, that’s slightly different,” he says, chuckling.

For the past decade Rick has enjoyed a musical comeback and a wave of Gen Z fans, many of whom became aware of him thanks to the ‘Rickrolling’ phenomenon which happened via an internet meme linking people to his original video of Never Gonna Give You Up.

“There’s a generation who love 1980s or early 1990s and weren’t even there. We used to run a mile from our parents’ music, but today younger people don’t have the same hang-up about liking something.”

He doesn’t particularly mix in celebrity circles, although he and Gary Barlow text a bit and he’ll give Kylie Minogue a hug when he sees her. He sang at Kylie’s 50th birthday party and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has previously invited him to sing with the band on stage.

“I never was cool,” Rick says. “But it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

By the time he stepped back from being a pop star, he had become a parent to his daughter Emilie at the age of 25 and the punishing work schedule and accompanying fame had taken its toll. He sought therapy, which not only helped him get his marriage back on track, but also brought to light unresolved issues from his dysfunctional childhood.

“I gained some sanity first because I’d been in a tumble dryer for four or five years of being famous worldwide. If you go back before the internet, being famous everywhere was a shock. Everything I did in the UK I did in 25 countries or more, in terms of the workload.

“I wouldn’t call it a nervous breakdown, but I was a bit broken. I don’t think you can push somebody through a sausage machine like that for five years without there being a bit of residual fallout at the end of it.”

He continues: “Like any couple, my wife and I went through certain situations. I was a pain in the a*** sometimes because I went from playing an arena in Tasmania to becoming this guy who lives in a very nice house in Richmond and wants to drop his daughter off at school.”

Never by Rick Astley (Macmillan, £25) is out now